A Glorf by any Other Name

Revisiting the topic addressed in this post in the light of Rodvik Linden's very disappointing response on the subject.  (Bad Rodvik!  No plaudits-from-obscure-SL-blogger-nobody's-ever-heard-of!)

There has been a lot of heat already shed on the question of names, and I doubt I shall be able to shed any more light, but here goes.  It seems to me that the problem is reducible to a couple of bullet points:-

• New users want to be able to have a user name that looks like a real human name.
• Right now, they can't do that.

There has been much shouting about the (frankly dubious) merits of both the new Display Names and the old pick-a-last-name-from-the-list system, and really, one could address the central issue without either.  I'm sure nobody wants to get rid of Display Names (although, as I said last time, they really are a hopeless compromise that pleases nobody much), and as for the list system, it just takes time and effort from someone at Linden Lab who could probably be more usefully employed fixing the damn bugs already.

Rodvik's last pronouncements on the matter contained, to my mind, a germ of common sense, in that he suggested being able to use some special characters, like dashes and underscores, in a new user name.  Being able to be jack-bloggs instead of jackbloggs12345 would, at least, be a tiny step forward.  Presumably, some client-side validation is going to be needed to make sure people don't call themselves "--------" or something.  Or maybe not, what do I know?

The more-or-less obvious solution, it seems to me, would be to allow periods in the name - remember, when the Great Change In Naming occurred, all existing avatar names were converted to the unitary format, only with a period to indicate where the first name left off and the last name began.  I am "Glorf" to some and "Miss Bulmer" to others, but to the servers I am simply "glorf.bulmer".  A bit of software finagling allows that to appear as "Glorf Bulmer", on my nametag and where scripts call for two-part names.

I don't pretend to be privy to the internal workings of the SL software, but I don't see any reason why, in principle, if "glorf.bulmer" is a workable name, I shouldn't be allowed to sign up as "glorftwo.electricboogaloo" tomorrow.  (I mean, apart from obvious ones involving good taste.)  I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this - in fact, I'm told the whole idea has been explicitly disallowed already, and why, I cannot for the life of me imagine.

But, then, I don't understand the reasoning behind the single-part names in the first place - the back-end changes must have been a chore to do, and I can't think of anybody on the user side of things who actually wanted this change.  It would make sense if, as with (say) Dungeons and Dragons Online, you had a login identifier you came in with, and then picked which character/identity you wanted to appear with inworld.  But SL doesn't work like this, and there are no signs that it ever will.

It is always a bad idea to impute motives to people you don't know, but I wonder if the whole Display Names thing isn't somebody's pet idea, and they are plugging it, and shooting down any suggestions of viable alternatives, in the hope that eventually the user base will get tired and give up and go along with it.  If so, bad idea.  As I pointed out last time, the reason why Display Names haven't taken the world by storm is not because SL users are reactionary and afraid of change; it's because Display Names are an inadequate compromise attempt to meet two different demands.  Ploughing on down the "get everyone to use Display Names" path, therefore, is a Bad Move.  The Lab has reversed itself and backed away from Bad Moves before now, and I hope they will have the wisdom to do so again.

Birth of a Legend

Was amused to see this item on New World Notes about Kingdom of Loathing... I don't play it myself, but it's where my name comes from, as (bad) luck would have it.

What passes for my mind, you see, went blank when I realised I had to make up a name for my Second Life avatar; as it happened, an idiot friend of mine was around at the time, and he suggested... the name of his KoL character.  So that is how I came to be called Glorf.  (My friend has a long and silly explanation of why his character is called "Glorf Pwlg", but I really haven't the strength to get into all that right now, and anyway it is extremely distasteful.)

We had been leafing through the recently published (at the time) reprints of the "Steel Claw" comic strip that day, and when I paged through the last names, I chose one in honour of the creator of the Claw, hack SF writer and editor Ken Bulmer.  And that's how I became the Brady Bunch - wait, I'm not the Brady Bunch.  Pity.  That name would have been almost sensible.

After all, I thought, it didn't really matter, I would just poke about this whole SL thing for a little while, see what it was like, and probably just let it drop when I got bored with it....

Well, that was March 2010, and here I am, still not bored yet.

I'm not sure if there is any moral to this story, except maybe "think about your name, you may be stuck with it for longer than you think", and also "I need to start hanging out with a better class of people".  (He doesn't read this, don't worry.)

On the catwalk

It's London Fashion Week or something - or maybe it was last week, I forget.

Anyway, that spurred me to revisit an old project and make some progress on it:-

I know, it's just too sexy for words, isn't it?

Not quite finished yet - I want to script that flashlamp along the left arm so it actually lights up, and some particle bubbles for the air tanks wouldn't go amiss, and I think I need to tidy up the alpha layer around the feet a bit.  But I progress.  Oh yes.

(I tried it in an off-the-peg male shape, too - seemed to work OK, though I don't know how well it might fit the muscly man-mountain avis that are so common.  Oh, well, it'll all be copy-mod if I sell it, so that's not really a problem, is it?)

All very unmilitary

An idea or two is revolving inside what passes for my brain, and part of it involves making a bunch of quasi-military uniforms.

Now, I may have mentioned previously that clothing design is not really my thing... so, to make my life simpler, I have been off trawling inworld stores and Marketplace for some appropriate template images.

And, after some hours doing that, I have reached some conclusions:-

• I am going to have to do the damn things myself from scratch.
• It is one whole heck of a lot easier to find skimpy crop-tops than it is to find complete coverage jackets or tunics.  Either the military is under-represented in SL, or it is under-dressed.
• I will never understand product pricing in SL as long as I live.  There is no discernible link between price and quality... and, presumably, someone must be out there buying the expensive tat.  Who are these people, and how can I persuade them to visit my shop?

The Name Game Blame Game

The naming of avs is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you an av must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES...

To wit, your User Name, Display Name, Full Name and possibly Legacy Name.  Wait, that's four.  I'm confused already, and so are a lot of other people.  And it may be about to get worse.  Let's recap....

Prior to the late-middle of  2010, avatar names were actually quite simple.  You signed up for SL, and you picked yourself a first name, which could be any sequence of ordinary letters, and you then chose from a list of allowable last names supplied by Linden Lab.  This was not popular with everybody, but it worked OK, it created a weird sense of community among people with the same last name (I have wandered over with a cheery "Hello cousin!" to the odd other Bulmer I have encountered, and some of them are very odd, let me tell you), and in general people got by with it.  So, all right, some people picked silly names like, for example, "Glorf" and were then saddled with them, but that wasn't really all that much of an issue....

... well, except for two or three classes of people who wanted some ability to change their names.  The first group consisted of people with a legitimate reason for wanting a permanent name change.  These might be business people who wanted to use their RL names in SL, or it might be people who, for example, had taken SL partners and wanted to change their surnames to reflect their SL family status.  (A third example, of people who just had rubbish names and wanted to upgrade, can safely be ignored; they should have known better than to call themselves "Glorf" in the first place.)

The second group consisted of roleplayers who wanted to be able to shift between multiple personas as whim (or RP need) took them.  After all, if you start off in a Roman RP sim and drift away a bit and get invited to take part in a Star Trek RP, it'd be pretty grim if you had to keep an inappropriate name like "Tiberius".... wait, bad example.  But my point stands.

Now, it may be apparent to you that these two classes of people actually want different things.  One of them wants a permanent name change, one time only (or at least one time for the foreseeable future only).  The second group wants a whole constellation of different setting-appropriate aliases that they can change between at will.  Can you see the difference, there?  Well, that makes you smarter than Linden Lab, then!

In the latter half of 2010, LL announced a completely new and different approach to names, and fur has been flying ever since.  The whole first-name-last-name thing would be gone; you would have a single user name that was just one single string of letters.  But, people said, surely people would soon run out of coherent and sensible things to call themselves, and would be forced to resort to things like "33434434" and suchlike?  (Genuine example, btw, I know the guy.)  That doesn't matter, said LL, because no one will ever see these names.  All they will ever see is the brand-spanking-new Display Name, which can be anything you like, can include all sorts of funky Unicode characters, and can be changed whenever you like!

Astute observers will have noticed that that's not the system we've got now; it was pointed out, with some force, to LL that a setup where anybody can change their name to anything is as close to a full-scale griefers' charter as one could possibly imagine.  And so, after some hemming and hawing, the current system was adopted, whereby:-

• The basic User Name is always visible,
• If you do bother with a Display Name, other people can choose whether or not they see it
• You can change your Display Name only once a week
• There are some protections against impersonation - especially in the case of the Linden last name, for pretty obvious reasons
• Because a whole bunch of existing scripts, and even the login screens of third party viewers, would get broken by the change, a setup was introduced whereby the word "Resident" was used as a placeholder for the last name in the case of a new, single-named avatar.  This is where the idea of "everyone now has the last name of Resident" comes from

Clear as mud?  Right.  But this is where the three different names come from.  I used to be called "Glorf Bulmer", but that is only my Legacy Name now, only it's sometimes also referred to as a Full Name.  My actual User Name is "glorf.bulmer".  I don't bother with a Display Name, normally, though I did once call myself "Brian Spartacus" just to make a point.

I sometimes wonder if the Lab could have come up with anything that so singularly failed to meet anyone's needs or expectations.  You want to change your User Name to reflect your in-world marriage?  You still can't.  You can change your Display Name, of course, but many people won't bother with it, and anyway it isn't the permanent change you were hoping for.  As for the roleplayer communities; well, I just hope you enjoy playing the same role for a minimum of a week at a time.  (Actually, you can change from your Display Name back to your User Name - well, OK, your Full Name - I think - any time you like, but you can't take on another Display Name for another week once you've done that.)

(Are you still mixed up about these Full Names?  So am I.  It might help to think about a newer, single-named avi; if their User Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom" - again, not a made-up example - then their Full Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom", but their Legacy Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom Resident".  Clear as mud, I know.)

Ancillary problems have, of course, developed.  Gibberish User Names very quickly became the norm, as new users discovered the names they wanted were already taken, couldn't think of an acceptable alternative, and settled for adding on random strings of numbers and letters until they found something that worked.  The option to include Unicode characters in Display Names allowed many non-English users to have names in their own alphabets, a triumph! - except for English-speaking users who had no idea how to type in those new names.  (And if someone's Display Name is in Chinese ideograms, and their User Name is something like "ituweds7533dkfteq", one's conversational options are pretty much limited to "Hey, you over there with the face".)  The whole "Resident" marker became synonymous with "newbie" in people's minds, leading to discrimination and distrust, leading to resentment and further distrust.

And let us not even talk about the problems for scripters, or for merchants (LL made the boneheaded decision to use Display Names in transaction logs, the one place where you absolutely have to have a clear record of who you've been dealing with), or people with obscene or otherwise unacceptable Display Names and even User Names (like "affordablecustompcsdotcom" and his wife "mrsaffordablecustompcsdotcom", lovely couple that they were)....

Now, it would be fair to say that this state of affairs has attracted adverse comment.  Granted, pretty much everything LL does from breathing upwards attracts adverse comment, but in this case it was fairly well deserved.  A change request (SVC-7125 ) was officially made, and it has attracted thousands of votes and a comment trail a mile long.

And, now, Linden Lab is moving on this.  And I just hope they're moving in something like the right direction.

Granted, I am more confident about LL these days; under the direction of its new CEO, things seem brighter and happier than they were.  Rodvik Linden has not been afraid to listen to SL residents and introduce improvements (the new V3 viewer answers pretty much all the genuine criticisms levelled at Viewer 2, for instance) and even to reverse his own mistakes (the much-touted and thoroughly horrible "Basic Mode" was quietly dropped once its Bad Idea-ness was amply demonstrated).  So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some effective change on this issue.

Except... the latest messages we've had on the topic indicate all sorts of odd things being considered, "user-community-granted titles" being among them.  And I am dreadfully worried that this might mean they are thinking of some new system of Byzantine and wonderful complexity - and that this might prove to be even more of a dog's breakfast than the current system.

So... all I can say is: please, Lindens, don't eff this one up again.